| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: with some difficulty; his knees shook, he felt dizzy, he was in a
cold sweat, he shivered, and found himself unable to walk,
struggling, as he was, with the agonizing shock caused by the
destruction of all his hopes. And at this moment he found lurking
in his memory a number of observations, trifling in themselves,
but which corroborated his frightful suspicions, and which, by
proving the certainty of this last incident, opened his eyes as
to the character and life of these two women.
Had they really waited till the portrait was given them before
robbing him of his purse? In such a combination the theft was
even more odious. The painter recollected that for the last two
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: pre-revolutionary artistic public had for the most part failed to
understand. Its pictures are "art for art's sake," and cannot
have done more than astonish, and perhaps terrify, the
peasants and the workmen of the country towns who had the
luck to see them. The "Red Cossack" is quite different.
As Burov put it with deep satisfaction, "At first we were in the
artists' hands, and now the artists are in our hands," a sentence
suggesting the most horrible possibilities of official
art under socialism, although, of course, bad art flourishes
pretty well even under other systems.
I inquired exactly how Burov and his
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: now very violent, especially on the north side of the city, as in
Shoreditch and Cripplegate parish, they did not think it safe for them
to go near those parts; so they went away east through Ratcliff
Highway as far as Ratcliff Cross, and leaving Stepney Church still on
their left hand, being afraid to come up from Ratcliff Cross to Mile
End, because they must come just by the churchyard, and because the
wind, that seemed to blow more from the west, blew directly from the
side of the city where the plague was hottest. So, I say, leaving
Stepney they fetched a long compass, and going to Poplar and
Bromley, came into the great road just at Bow.
Here the watch placed upon Bow Bridge would have questioned
A Journal of the Plague Year |
